Monday, November 4, 2013

The City of Salinas, California will take another huge step in bringing Priority Based Budgeting to fruition during the upcoming City Council meeting on Tuesday, November 5th. On the agenda during this meeting, the City Council will consider the fundamental reasons why the City provides programs and detail what goals the City of Salinas seeks to achieve: Results (and their corresponding Result Definitions).

What’s so tremendously exciting is that the City’s elected officials are attempting to articulate for what reasons they channel tax dollars to the programs they create, expand and partner to produce.“Results” stand for what it means to have a successful community, and a quality of life unique to the citizens of the City of Salinas, California.

Central to Priority Based Budgeting is the idea that all local government
organizations can determine the role they're suited to serve best within a
community, and amongst all potential service providers within a region -
identifying the overlap, the potential for partnerships, consolidated services,
and spinning off of services between city, county, school district, non-profit
and private sector organizations. The end goal is nothing short of the most
efficient use of a community's resources as a whole, to achieve the results of
a region – it’s "bang for the buck" for the provision of public
services.

Jon Johnson and Chris Fabian are pleased to share with you that the Center for Priority Based Budgeting officially opened its office on September 1, 2010, with its main objective being to “lead communities to Fiscal Health and Wellness.”

As most of you know, it was our desire from the very beginning of our partnership to create a not-for-profit environment that could support and sustain our work in not only providing advisory services to local governments across the country but also to find ways to continue our research efforts to better understand the fiscal conditions that are impacting local governments from coast to coast. Utilizing a business development technique found in the private sector, the Center was being “incubated” by another successful not-for-profit organization that also serves local governments. Graduating from the incubator in 2013, CPBB is now working with over 60 organizations who have implemented or are currently implementing the processes and tools of Fiscal Health and Priority Based Budgeting.

As before, we are striving to bring the principles of Fiscal Health and Wellness to all communities by teaching, coaching and guiding them in the development and implementation of our unique, creative and proven tools and techniques. We continue to improve upon our “Fiscal Health Diagnostic Tool”, which provides a quick assessment of any organization’s fiscal health status. We also continue to develop our “Resource Allocation Tool” which provides not only a mechanism to set target budgets based on our Priority Based Budgeting approach, but also serves as a way to depict how well any organization is aligning its resources with the programs and services that the community values. Our work has expanded to now include some interesting and successful citizen engagement opportunities with the communities we are partnering with in this work.

We have included our contact information below and hope that we can continue to reach out to those of you we have worked with in the past to further our research efforts as we continually strive to enhance the Priority Based Budgeting process as well as with the concepts of Fiscal Health and Wellness. We also hope to continue the conversation with those of you who have been following our work and share with you the stories of accomplishment and success from the organizations that have implemented Priority Based Budgeting. Please drop us a line anytime – we’re always glad to hear from you. In the meantime, please update your contact information and when you have the chance, check out our blog site to find out what we’ve been doing since our last conversation with you.